Readers

So we were talking the other day about the way credibility in building a fictional world can be as much about perception as reality. You could safely bet the mortgage that there will be readers flagging as impossible the well-researched things you KNOW you absolutely nailed, while passing without a qualm the ones you sort of skated on. Actually skated a lot on. Over thin ice, with heated boots and ski poles for balance perforating the ice all around you.

Getting corrected on your caliber by a genuine gun expert is one thing, but a lot of times it’s regular people just deciding you must be wrong, refusing to read you because of it, and telling others about it (this chat came to some degree out of someone doing just that on a discussion board, thoroughly panning a certain book based on a  lot of wrong and wrong-headed historical assumptions). Which is fine, you can’t please everyone and c’est la vie and all that, but it is somewhat maddening when it turns out their reasons are just because it sounds wrong to them or doesn’t match what their favorite uncle always said or they know they heard something different somewhere… sometime.

Which lead to some discussion about how and why people read and think they know things. Which in turn lead one of the group, whose reported life has this tendency to always be a bit more perfect than the rest of us, to pronounce that these people probably didn’t read enough to know anything (we weren’t sure how they would have gotten involved enough with a book to carp if that was the case, but there are times to raise these concerns and then there are those other times... this was definitely one of those). She added that the problem was the schools, that she had homeschooled her kids K-12 and look at the readers her kids turned out to be. Of course they were so smart to begin with. Slight coughs all around. Oh dear, is it really that time already…

A group of us scuttled quickly out in search of revivifying liquids, but still wondering what made some people readers and others not. Everyone gets exposed to books at some point, but they only "take" with some of us. And nothing against home schooling, but whatever turned us personally into history buffs and lifelong voracious readers, that wasn’t it. While the member of the group who was a teacher herself (you may have already guessed that tact was not a strong point of the group member with the perfect life and kids) also had kids who went to public schools and managed to come out the other side with a love of reading and nicely working brains.

Figuring out the history buff part was easy. One of us, a well thought of historical mystery author herself, was turned into a history buff by that very thing: her public school. She was already a reader but that’s where she was exposed to the second passion that created a profession. I was one of those ensnared by Thomas Costain’s books about the Plantagenet kings of England, which showed in vivid, full of life fashion that history was very much about some amazing stories and not just the boring test prep factual drill we got in school. The Costain books hooked a surprising number of people, including a whole bunch of professional historians on an academic history list I’m on. They aren’t scholarly in the sense of meticulous footnotes and preference for dry facts over telling a story. But they’re not bad history either, with more integrity than a lot of popular history published today—he clearly did a reasonable amount of research and followed the known facts, while making it very clear when he was extrapolating on his own. That extrapolation was generally just about padding things a bit to bring them to life, a matter of too much he “must have” said this and she “must have” looked like that to make scholars happy. Current research makes some of what he says out of date, but they're still worth reading and still a great way to get a reluctant student interested in both reading and history.

When it came to reading, we decided the one thing that probably matters most was the one we had in common: parents who not only read to us, but read themselves as a normal part of their everyday lives. Books were simply a natural part of our environment. They weren't limited to expensively bound shelf decorations or "keeping up professionally" adult homework, and they definitely weren't in the "children, don't touch" category. They were the sweeping family saga sitting by the kitchen table to relax with when Mom got a break, the "feeding the curious mind" pile of nonfiction by the lounger that Dad would grab from to show me something during commercials on TV. Our parents read as if it was a natural, assumed, everyday pleasure, like walking the dog or relaxing in the tub. We may not read the same sorts of things as our parents, but because they read around us as well as to us, we read too. It's one of the best gifts they could have given us—not just a love of reading but the belief that reading was a normal part of everyday life and there was no such thing as not reading "because you don't have time," even if all you could manage was a few minutes here and there. The benefits will ripple through the rest of our lives and the lives of those we touch.

Comments

[Clothdragon]

My husband and I grew up poor and went to public school -- and we have some of those home-schooled friends who constantly belittle public school, often not realizing that their words are insulting the very people they're talking to. Both my husband and I -- and one of my sisters -- are avid readers.

For my sister and I, I can see where we became readers. We had the stereotypical poor family including the angry and abusive drunk father. We needed the escape. My youngest sister tried the other direction and fully immersed herself in that world, having her first child at 14.

My husband had less abuse and anger to escape, but his parents divorced, lived in separate cities and his father collected a second family relatively quickly, making summers unpleasant. He also chose the escape of reading.

In a better environment, my oldest is at that age where reading is becoming important or at least possible, and she's struggling with it. She's thrilled to grab a book and read to her younger brother, but the first time she trips over a word she hates reading and doesn't understand why she has to learn.

We've discussed that it's like drawing and the more she practices, the easier it will be. And we've said that reading is the most important thing she'll learn in school. That, on the practical side, written words let her know what store she's going into, which direction she needs to go, as well as what, exactly, people are trying to sell her. Or, on the fun side, words give her access to a million worlds she would otherwise never see.

In the next few years we'll find out if we've managed to create another reader or not.

[Kim Malo]

Great response all around! I understand the read to escape concept all too well, just for a different reason - I grew up isolated in a very small town. And I don't think that point about it getting much easier with practice (as with so many other things) gets said enough.

[Mike Dennis]

Right on! My mother read to me extensively when I was young, so that when I could read for myself, I couldn't get enough. It pointed me in the direction of a wider world beyond my small, provincial hometown.